Eight Hopkins students have been named the 2008 finalists in a prestigious inventors competition.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation announced the finalists of its Collegiate Inventors Competition, who include two teams of seven undergraduate students total and one additional graduate student.
Originally founded by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, along with other groups, the competition aims to recognize innovation in college students and explore work that is being done in colleges.
The foundation named 12 finalists this year who will compete in Kansas City in November for the top three spots in the competition: $15,000 each to the top undergraduate and graduate finalists and $25,000 to the grand prize winner.
A panel of judges, which includes famous inventors, will hear the presentations and ask questions. One of the members of the panel will be Hopkins professor and former Inventor's Hall of Famer Jim West.
According to Jeffrey Dollinger, chief development officer of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the projects will be considered based on their likelihood to get a patent and eventually earn a spot in the marketplace. The competition received 100 applications from students from 80 universities around the country last June.
Students Joshua Lerman, Hanlin Wan and Swarnali Sengupta worked on an Intensive Care Unit Mover Aid under advisor Dale Needham, an intensive care unit physician.
Both undergraduate projects were part of the biomedical engineering design team course.
"I challenged the students to design a biomedical engineering device to make it more feasible and effective and safer to do this early mobilization of ICU patients," Needham said.
According to Needham, a current trend of approaches to ICU treatment includes the concept of early mobility, which revolutionizes the traditional method of letting patients lie immobilized in hospital beds. The disuse of muscles leads to muscle weakness. According to Needham, this is why early mobility, which encourages ICU patients to walk as soon as possible, is a new, necessary approach.
Because the early mobility requires four people to help an ICU patient move, Hopkins undergraduates designed an instrument that reduced the number of people needed to move an ICU patient and facilitated movement.
The "Mover Aid," which has been featured by the American Institute of Physics, is a walker with a novel difference: An emergency seat is built into the instrument. This addition eliminates the need for a person who traditionally pushes a wheelchair from behind in case the patient collapses when moving.
The second part of the instrument is called the "tower," which is a "glorified IV pole," according to Needham. The pole was built to include life support equipment, treatment and a monitoring system.
When designing the tower, students included a special spot for a cardiac monitor that gives readouts on the patient's heart rate and oxygen tanks. "In the entire history of the design course this project is the only project used on a real patient during the time of the course," Needham said. "That reflected a great deal of genuine interest to truly do something that would have a lasting impact on patients and on our ICU."
The other undergraduate project was undertaken by students Joshua Liu, Gayathree Murugappan, Kevin Yeh and Vicki Zhou under advisor Robert Allen, and worked to keep patients' intestines away from an abdominal surgery site. The project was referred to in the title as "a novel means for bowel packing."
According to project leader Yeh, clinicians who need to gain access to surgical sites perform bowel packing, which means that they move away organs they do not plan to operate on. When restraining these parts, cotton, sponges and towels are often used, which have in some cases been left behind in patients' bodies. Because these materials are not designed specifically for organ restraint, there is no structural rigidity or integrity in the material.
The project, according to Yeh, involved a one-piece approach to minimize the chances of it being left behind. The silicon derivative, polidimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a "kind of rubbery transparent material," according to Yeh, was used to create a device that stayed in place during surgery.
Using this material instead of traditional materials will prevent ripping and provide flexibility, which limits trauma to the organs and enables the instrument to conform to the unique shape of each patients' intestinal area.
According to Yeh, the project has been successful, winning two entrepreneurship competitions: MoshPit (run by UMBC) and the Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition.
The project has already filed a patent application through the Johns Hopkins Tech Transfer for a provisional patent, but Yeh said his co-members have been exploring options for the future of the project.
"One possibility is that we continue under the guidance of clinicians and that Hopkins would license the technology to independent parties," he said.
Graduate student Curtis Chong, from the School of Medicine, also placed as a finalist for a project that identified an antifungal drug Intraconazole as useful for treating cancer and common issues associated with diabetes.
Last year, a Hopkins graduate student Ian Cheong won the overall grand prize for a novel way to treat cancer by liposomase for generalized drug delivery.
